Evaluating Mobility Support in ZigBee Networks
The deployment of ZigBee networks is expected to facilitate numerous applications, such as home healthcare, medical monitoring, consumer electronics, and environmental sensors. For many envisioned applications, device mobility is unavoidable and must be a
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Department of Computer Science, University of California at Los Angeles 2 Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica
Abstract. The deployment of ZigBee networks is expected to facilitate numerous applications, such as home healthcare, medical monitoring, consumer electronics, and environmental sensors. For many envisioned applications, device mobility is unavoidable and must be accommodated. Therefore, providing ubiquitous connection to/from a mobile ZigBee device is crucial for future ZigBee applications. In particular, knowledge of how nodal mobility affects ZigBee routing protocol is of significance. In this paper, our contributions are twofold. First, we dissect ZigBee routing and its support for device mobility, and we analyzed the current provisions in dealing with different mobility cases. Second, we performed a rich set of preliminary tests, illustrating the inefficacy of current standard. Our results indicate that ZigBee device type plays a significant role in determining the routing performance in most mobile scenarios. Keywords: Mobility, Routing, ZigBee, IEEE 802.15.4, Simulation.
1 Introduction With wireless networking technologies permeating into the very fabrics of our working and living environment, simple appliances and numerous traditional wired services can now be efficiently connected wirelessly. This provides simple yet effective control/monitoring conveniences, while allowing very interesting applications to be developed on top of these wireless network enabled gadgets. The ZigBee standard [2], designed to interconnect simple devices, is the latest attempt to realize this wireless network vision. In the context of a business environment, this wireless technology can facilitate better automated control/management of facilities and assets. Additionally, there are also many ZigBee applications for home-appliance networks,home healthcare, medical monitoring, consumer electronics, and environmental sensors. For an environment richly connected with ZigBee devices, drastic topological changes can occur due to device failures, mobility, and other factors. For certain applications, device mobility is unavoidable. For example, a health monitoring application for the elderly described in [4] [3], where a ZigBee enabled health monitoring sensor alerts the hospital, through an adjacent network, when a health-related emergency has occurred. The consequence is disastrous if the message was not delivered as intended. Therefore, understanding the performance of ZigBee networks becomes
This work was co-sponsored by the National Science Council and the National Science Foundation under grant numbers NSC 95-2218-E-002-072 and ANI-0335302.
T.-W. Kuo et al. (Eds.): EUC 2007, LNCS 4808, pp. 87–100, 2007. c IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2007
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important in determining the applicability of many applications. In particular, knowledge of how nodal mobility affects the workings of the ZigBee routing protocols is of significance. Without a doubt, mobility suppor
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